[I have no clue what happened to this page that it started displaying the HTML code, or when it happened. I apologize to anyone who's been looking for this information. I only discovered it when I added KDE to a new LMDE laptop and wanted to get Electric Sheep working on it. -Peng]
I mentioned last month that I got Electric Sheep, a very cool open source artwork screen saver, working after I changed my desktop environment from GNOME to KDE. Unfortunately a week or so ago I decided to do a fresh install of Kubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx (after not being able to install Linux Mint for some odd reason). Unfortunately once I did my fresh install of Kubuntu I lost the ability to use Electric Sheep as my screensaver again.
From my earlier install I knew I needed to install xscreensaver so I installed it pretty quickly this time around without success. I had followed the Linux Client Instructions on the Electric Sheep website and even tried using the modified electricsheep.desktop file from both the Electric Sheep website and from KDE-Look.org and put it in both of the specified directories, /usr/share/kde4/services/ScreenSavers and ~/.kde4/share/kde4/services/ScreenSavers. Still I got bupkis.
After spending several hours over many days trying to figure out what was going wrong I started looking at why the Really Slick Screensavers, which I had also installed, wasn’t available in the screensaver options window either. My logic was that if I couldn’t run Electric Sheep I’d at least try running the Skyrocket screensaver from the Really Slick collection. I ended up finding a set of .desktop files for using the Really Slick collection on KDE on openSUSE over at KDE-Apps.org and it gave a different location to put the extracted .desktop files: /usr/share/kde4/services/ScreenSavers.
I put the Really Slick Screensavers .desktop files into that folder, plus I copied the electricsheep.desktop file I had downloaded into that directory as well. It was about time for me to power down my computer so I shut down for the night and when I turned it back on today I checked my Screen Saver dialog and found the Sheep were available to me. Needless to say I’m back to channeling John Lurie.
Remember, for this to work you have to have xscreensaver installed on your system as electricsheep.
I’m posting the directory I found to work on both the Electric Sheep and KDE-Look.org pages I used to try to get the Sheep working on KDE so others can see what I found to work but I wanted to post it here as well for anyone who gets my blog as a possible resource while trying to find a solution, as well as to make sure the info is handier the next time I end up needing it.
